Evolution did not go wrong.
That was the mistake outsiders would later make, trying to explain this place with the vocabulary of failure.
Evolution went exactly as it was allowed to.
Life had been given a world far too large, rules far too loose, and a reality that did not insist on consistency. Natural selection did not ask what should survive. It only asked what could.
And in this universe, the answer was: almost anything.
Cells learned quickly that symmetry was optional. Limbs elongated not because they were useful, but because nothing stopped them. Eyes appeared in places that had no business seeing—on bark, beneath translucent skin, embedded in stone that remembered once being soft.
Most of it was not sentient.
That mattered.
Horror did not require awareness.
Forests were among the first to change.
Trees grew taller, then thinner, then impossibly narrow, stretching upward and inward at the same time. Branches interlaced until light itself struggled to decide where it belonged. Leaves hardened into things that looked like pupils, dilating and contracting as creatures passed beneath them.
The forest watched.
Not thoughtfully.
Not consciously.
It watched the way lungs breathe and stomachs digest.
Creatures that wandered too deep did not die immediately. The forest preferred patience. Vines brushed against fur and skin, not cutting, not crushing—just touching. Roots hummed softly as they coiled, and something subtle happened then.
Memories were stripped away.
Not all at once. Not violently.
Scenes loosened. Names slipped. Faces blurred. Childhoods unraveled thread by thread, absorbed into the soil like nutrients. By the time the forest finished, the creature no longer remembered why it had been afraid in the first place.
Then it was eaten.
The forest grew richer for it.
Everywhere—everywhere—there was giggling.
Always distant. Always faint. Always just out of reach.
Childlike. Mischievous. Unconcerned.
No source could ever be found.
Animals adapted.
Some grew too many mouths and learned to speak with none of them. Others flattened themselves against reality until predators passed through them without noticing. Insects learned to scream without sound, and the things that heard them learned to enjoy it.
Madness did not arrive suddenly.
It accreted.
Behaviors that would have been considered aberrant elsewhere were simply… efficient here. Creatures that hunted fear outperformed those that hunted flesh. Parasites that fed on expectation rather than blood spread faster and left less resistance behind.
Still, most of them did not think.
They did not need to.
And then there was the candy forest.
No one remembered it being created.
It simply existed.
A sprawling biome of sugar-glass trees and syrup rivers, of soft caramel soil and crystalline candy leaves that chimed when the wind—if it could be called that—passed through. Life flourished there too: gelatinous creatures that bounced instead of walked, licorice-thin predators that slithered between gumdrop stones, swarms of sugar insects that dissolved into laughter when threatened.
It was bright.
It was cheerful.
It was deeply, profoundly wrong.
Nothing in the candy forest tried to hurt you.
That was what made it worse.
The giggling was louder there.
Not closer.
Just… louder.
And above it all—unaware, sleeping, dreaming without images—the realm itself rested.
Life twisted.
Worlds adapted.
Horror normalized.
And somewhere deep within the growing madness of forests and fields, evolution quietly prepared something new.
Something that would think.